SiteGround is one of the best shared hosting providers and one of the most popular hosting solutions among WordPress users, with some unique qualities. While more affordable options exist, SiteGround offers great value for money and equips you with the latest technology, such as Google Cloud infrastructure and LiteSpeed web servers for excellent performance . In addition, you get in-house security solutions , including firewalls.
But is it easy to use for beginners? How secure and fast is it? In this SiteGround review, we’ll combine user reviews and our in-house testing experience to guide you through all the features SiteGround has to offer and answer all your questions. You’ll learn all about security, performance, usability, support, and more.
SiteGround Pros and Cons
What we like
- Very fast page loading times
- Servers on four continents
- Innovation Acceleration Technology
- Free SSL on all plans
- Free website builder included
- Customize the dashboard
- Free domain name
Things We Don't Like
- No mid-tier scalability options
- No VPS hosting options
- Disk space could be larger
Visit SiteGround to learn more about its features
Hosting Management – Is SiteGround easy to use?
SiteGround impresses when it comes to ease of use, which puts it at the top of our best web hosting list . With a native hosting control panel and an easy-to-use interface, the provider ensures that everything is easy to find and use.
SiteGround Setup Process
The first step with SiteGround is to decide what type of hosting you need - WordPress, WooCommerce, Cloud, or Reseller. After that, the process of setting up hosting is pretty straightforward.
After you subscribe to SiteGround, go to the Websites tab and click New Website . Then, choose whether you want a new domain name , an already purchased domain, or want to use a temporary domain first.
In the next step, you have to choose whether you want to start a new website or migrate an existing one. After clicking Start a New Website, you have to choose an application to build your website . The last step is to provide your login credentials and start building your SiteGround website.
SiteGround Control Panel
SiteGround has ditched the cPanel that the company used until 2020 and replaced it with Site Tools. This is a hosting control panel developed in-house - a modern and functional option that's easy to use even if you've never seen any control panel before.
You can access site tools from the administration area of each individual website.
By the way, this is also a very useful interface as it has shortcuts to specific site tools menu items and a WordPress admin panel login button.
We personally enjoyed using the site tools. The main menu on the left is easy to navigate and each tool has a description. At the same time, you can customize it to your personal needs - pin the tools you use most to the home screen.
In addition, here you can also see how much disk space you use and how many visitors come to your website.
Some of the features you can access from the control panel include:
- Sitebuilder – Quick and easy access to SiteGround’s free website builder on all plans
- CDN 2.0 – allows you to optimize website speed by managing your content delivery network
- Website Scanner – This will scan your website host for any weaknesses
- SSL – Free with every subscription plan
- Dedicated IP – Manage your dedicated website IP address
Overall, Site Tools is just as powerful as cPanel. Plus, it looks better, too.
WordPress 的 SiteGround
Installing WordPress on SiteGround doesn’t require much effort or prior knowledge. The provider will simply guide you through the required steps. All you need to do is **find the WordPress installation in the main dashboard . Alternatively, you can click **Website > New Site in the main menu .
You also have the option to migrate your existing website to SiteGround. This is a free and convenient option - the host has its own WP Migrator plugin to help you change hosting providers smoothly. In all other cases, just select the application you want - WordPress or WordPress with WooCommerce.
After that, you just need to fill in information like your email address and password. Lastly, you can choose to add some extra security measures to your website. We personally would skip this step and use a third-party tool to fill in the security gaps.
Once you click Finish , the installation will be complete in just a few minutes. SiteGround will then launch its WordPress Starter Sites plugin to help you set up your actual website. You can choose from multiple themes and set up the most commonly used features to make it easy to get started.
Overall, the whole process was effortless . SiteGround proves itself to be a convenient WordPress web hosting provider that takes care of everything. All you have to do is select your options and come up with a secure password (it can even be automatically generated).
Essential features: SSL certificate, email hosting, and SiteGround staging
To help you host a professional-looking website, SiteGround includes a variety of additional tools to enhance your user experience.
One of these tools is an SSL certificate , which you must activate yourself. We tested this feature with WildCard SSL, which is free and protects your primary domain and all its subdomains.
Once your domain is activated, go to HTTPS Enforce in the left menu and make sure it is turned on.
Another important tool you get with any SiteGround subscription is email hosting. The process of creating a professional email address with SiteGround is just as easy as creating a new website . Maybe even easier. All you need to do is come up with a name for your email address and generate a secure password.
You can create as many email accounts as you want with SiteGround, even on the Starter plan. To do this, simply go to the Email Accounts section in your Site Tools admin panel.
SiteGround limits your mailbox to 512MB by default, but you can change it at any time. Just press the 3 little dots next to your email.
In the same menu, you can also access your actual mailbox - that's the Log In to Webmail option.
SiteGround uses the RoundCube email client, which itself is a bit outdated. Still, it gets the job done. Additionally, the provider has added a handy menu on the left so that you can set up autoresponders or forwarders. SiteGround has also launched Email Marketing, which makes managing email campaigns easy and efficient. You can create campaigns with a single click and craft your messages using our intuitive email builder.
What’s more, SiteGround is one of the very few providers (starting with GrowBig) that includes a site preparation tool in its shared hosting. When available, it’s an essential feature to ensure that website development and improvement is smooth and secure.
This feature creates a copy of your website to test changes or make improvements. To create a staging environment, all you have to do is give it a name and press the Create button. If you have a lot of features you want to test, feel free to create as many staging environments as you want - or as many as your plan allows.
When you deploy changes from a staging environment to a published site, you can choose what to deploy. You can transfer all changes or just some of the files, depending on what works best.
Overall, it is one of the best tools when developing and managing a website .
Performance – SiteGround speed, uptime, and stress tests
SiteGround is one of the fastest shared hosting providers we’ve tested. Not only that, it’s also very reliable and can handle a lot of traffic.
The reason why SiteGround shows one of the best performance results is because it has very powerful technology behind it:
- Server location selection . You can choose a server from 8 locations - United States (Iowa, Virginia, Texas, California), United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Singapore, and Australia.
- Latest technologies and software optimization. SiteGround implements the latest security updates as soon as they become available. Some examples of what your website will use include the latest PHP versions, HTTP/2 and QUIC, TLS 1.3, and OCSP Stapling.
- In-house speed solution . Ultrafast PHP and custom MySQL setup. For GrowBig and GoGeek plans, SiteGround introduced a custom PHP setup called Ultrafast PHP. For all plans, a custom MySQL setup was also implemented, which solved the problem of slow MySQL queries and further improved the speed.
- SuperCacher and SG Optimizer. SuperCacher is a 3-tier caching tool that reduces page load times, caches static website content, and saves CPU resources. SG Optimizer allows you to manage cache settings directly in the WP admin dashboard and provides you with a range of useful tools to improve speed.
The good news
SiteGround uses the most powerful Google Cloud server infrastructure, so you know you’re getting the best hardware available today. The backend setup helps the provider stay ahead of the curve and avoid any technical issues associated with running servers.
We have tested SiteGround’s performance on the GrowBig plan to find out how this hosting provider really performs.
SiteGround Uptime and Response Time
First, we looked at the provider’s reliability. In nearly 2 months, SiteGround had only 3 outages. That was a total of 7 minutes of downtime. That puts the average uptime at a perfect 99.99%.
While both Standard and SiteGround offer an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, the actual results are even more impressive.
To put that in perspective, 99.9% means we have nearly 9 hours of downtime per year. 99.99% is only 52 minutes .
SiteGround Speed Test
To test SiteGround’s speed performance, we wanted to check how fast the provider loads a completely empty website, as well as a website with WordPress installed from different locations. To do this, we used the GTmetrix tool, and here are the results:
For this test, we hosted our site in the United States, so the best result is from the United States—at just 0.3 seconds. This result is even faster than Hostinger , which took 479 milliseconds to load during our test. The difference between the two is small; however, SiteGround does have a slight advantage.
London and Mumbai, on the other hand, had slower times than the US. While this is to be expected, the results we got are still very impressive – by comparison, Hostinger in the UK took 1.3 seconds, while Mumbai took 1.7 seconds. Therefore, SiteGround’s 481 ms and 0.9 seconds are right on target.
How do we know? Google’s benchmark for loading time is 2.5 seconds. SiteGround meets this requirement and beats it by a few seconds.
But that wasn’t a real website. Next, we installed a nice theme with demo content. In fact, it got pretty heavy. And SiteGround didn’t hold back. LCP increased to 0.8 seconds, but that’s still very fast.
SiteGround Stress Test
To test SiteGround's ability to handle user traffic, we performed a stress test. Our baseline was the 25,000 visits per month promised by the GrowBig plan. So, we sent 50 virtual users to our site, plus 30 days of continuous daily traffic, totaling to about 50 users per month. SiteGround handled all the traffic it received without any problems.
What's important here is the blue line (which represents speed) and the gray line (which represents visitors). While there was a spike, overall SiteGround did have a hard time handling the amount of traffic we sent to their servers. Therefore, we think this test shows that SiteGround can handle more than the 25,000 visitors per month that they promise.
On top of that, SiteGround’s performance was excellent. The uptime was better than guaranteed, and the site loaded very quickly. Not to mention that the provider didn’t embarrass itself when we loaded the site.
Bonus Tip: SIteGround automatically evaluates your website’s various performance categories every month, including cache ratio, CDN utilization, data center and network speed, WordPress optimization, etc. You will then receive a detailed performance report with your overall website performance score, individual scores for each category, and actionable recommendations via email in case certain areas need improvement.
SiteGround Security
SiteGround has several security features designed to protect its servers and all the websites hosted on them. For example, every plan comes with free SSL to protect your visitors’ connections or daily backups so you can restore your website if anything happens.
Your SiteGround subscription comes with additional security features:
- Real-time monitoring system - checks server status every 0.5 seconds.
- Custom Web Application Firewall (WAF) – SiteGround adds new rules every year. Hundreds of them. This helps protect against emerging application vulnerabilities.
- AI Anti-Bot System – Designed to block millions of threats every day.
- SiteGround Security Plugin – It protects against common attacks such as brute force, common malware, and other issues well known to the WordPress community.
- Free Native CDN Setup – This helps protect your website from DDoS attacks and blocks any malicious content. When your website content is distributed to multiple servers around the world, the original IP is masked. Also, it improves website speed for users accessing your website from distant locations.
- Daily automatic backups – Restore your site with just one click. Also, you can choose what to restore: emails, all files and databases, only files, or only databases.
- Monthly Security Report . A summary of your results, including your site's overall security score, a breakdown of your scores for each security check, and actionable tips for certain areas that require your attention.
The backups are distributed and stored in different data centers to increase redundancy and security, so even if one copy is damaged, there is still a good backup available.
One downside to SiteGround’s approach to security is that it makes domain privacy a paid option — it costs $12 for the first year and $24 per year for renewals. Many domain registrars don’t even bother to charge for domain privacy. However, if you’re from Europe, you don’t have to worry.
Overall, we are happy with SiteGround’s security features. It is a really secure web hosting provider. While domain privacy is an additional cost, there are a lot of additional security features that make up for it.
What types of SiteGround hosting are there?
SiteGround has features that are compatible with different types of hosting. While there is no VPS hosting option (which is great for users who are familiar with hosting solutions and need a lot of resources), there are plenty of other options to suit different needs.
WordPress Hosting
SiteGround offers WordPress hosting plans starting at $2.99 per month. There are multiple options within the plan that offer more features. However, no matter which plan you choose, you will get free SSL, WordPress installation, unlimited traffic, CDN 2.0, a free domain name , and many other features.
WooCommerce Hosting
SiteGround’s WooCommerce hosting plans are very beneficial for those who want to successfully manage a website with an online store . Prices start from $2.99 per month and are scalable. It also comes with a pre-installed WooCommerce plugin that allows you to sell any product or service, has configurable shipping options, and the ability to accept payments out of the box.
Cloud Hosting
SiteGround's cloud hosting solutions allow you to grow your business website using its hosting services . Prices start at $100.00 per month, but there are several different scalability options. Each plan comes with a different number of CPU cores, memory storage, SSD space, free domain name, and supported data transfer amounts.
Reseller Hosting
SiteGround's reseller hosting allows you to sell hosting services to your customers . This way, you can start selling hosting solutions without having to own your own equipment. SiteGround's reseller plans start at $4.99 per month, but you can scale your business and sell more expensive hosting solutions.
SiteGround Pricing and Hosting Plans
SiteGround is a slightly more advanced hosting provider with shared hosting plans starting at $2.99 per month.
The host does not offer dedicated hosting options, but it does offer VPS services as well as cloud hosting services suitable for very large and popular websites for $100.00 per month. However, since shared hosting is the more popular option for creating a website, we will mainly cover the prices for shared hosting plans.
| StartUP | GrowBig | GoGeek |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.99/month | $4.99/month | $7.99/month |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited |
| SSD storage | 10GB | 20GB |
| Monthly visitors supported | Up to 10,000 | Up to 100,000 |
| Free domain (frist year) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Free SSL | ✅ | ✅ |
| Free CDN | ✅ | ✅ |
| Free Email | ✅ | ✅ |
| Free site transfer | ✅ | ✅ |
| Daily backups | ✅ | ✅ |
| Unlimited bandwidth | ✅ | ✅ |
| Staging | ❌ | ✅ |
| PHP setup | ❌ | ✅ |
| Collaboration tool | ❌ | ✅ |
| Private DNS | ❌ | ❌ |
| White-label panel | ❌ | ❌ |
| Priority support | ❌ | ❌ |
First, all 3 shared hosting plans come with a free domain name , free SSL certificate, email accounts, native CDN, automatic daily backups, unlimited bandwidth, and built-in caching . You also get different server resources and additional features depending on the plan you choose.
Pro Tips
Please note that the above prices are for a 12-month billing cycle and will increase significantly upon renewal.
[](https://cybernews.com/best-web-hosting/siteground-review/)
For shared hosting, SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, even for renewals. If the renewal period has not started, but you have already paid, you will get a full refund. In other cases, the first month's fee will be deducted from the refund.
All in all, SiteGround’s pricing is complex, but it really is a great value for money. The included tools and features far exceed what you’ll find with other best shared hosting providers .
Best Value
To get the best deal, the approach we took was to buy GrowBig and pay for 3 years upfront. This way, the monthly price will always be $17.49/month. Total – $629.64. The price will not increase and the renewal will not be higher.
Does SiteGround have a website builder?
Yes, SiteGround includes a free website builder with their hosting plans . However, we can’t say it’ll make our list of the best website builders any time soon.
The free website builder offered by SiteGround is very limited. It’s aimed at beginners, so there aren’t many features. You get a simple drag-and-drop builder; there’s little customization for the additional features you can add to your site. Additionally, there are pre-made themes for both mobile and desktop sites, and you can even set up your own eCommerce site.
However, that’s about as far as this website builder goes. Both of these alternatives have more features available, better themes, and customization capabilities than paid-for website builders like Bluehost or Wix.
SiteGround Customer Support
| 24/7 live chat | ✅ |
|---|---|
| ❌ | |
| Ticketing system | ✅ |
| Phone line | ✅ |
| Knowledge base | ✅ |
| AI Assistant | ✅ |
SiteGround offers customer support through multiple channels. Live chat, phone support, and help desk tickets are available 24/7 . There’s also an extensive knowledge base, help widgets on every page of the account control panel and site tools, and an intelligent AI chatbot. It’s powered by ChatGPT, trained by SiteGround’s AI engineers, and backed by expert, timely engineering support to provide accurate answers through a wide range of frequently asked questions and resolve specific queries.
We read a lot of SiteGround reviews, and they all said that SiteGround’s customer support was excellent. Add to that several Stevie Awards for Customer Service and the provider’s claims of a 97.7% customer satisfaction rating in previous years. Of course, we didn’t want to believe it, so we decided to try it out for ourselves.
The first thing we noticed is that SiteGround would rather you use the help widget . After all, it’s there on every page. The widget takes you to the Help Center where you can find a ton of articles and tutorial information.
Of course, you might want to connect with a real person instead of reading countless tutorials.
SiteGround support is very efficient and fast. That’s what we expect.
SiteGround Hosting Review – Final Thoughts
SiteGround is one of the best web hosting services because it guarantees a high uptime of 99.9% and speeds of up to 311 ms . All its shared hosting plans include free SSL certificates, email accounts, native CDN, automatic backups, and built-in caching.
Although the pricing is a bit high, SiteGround uses the latest technological solutions, such as Google Cloud infrastructure and LiteSpeed web servers, to ensure optimal performance. In addition, their customer support team is very professional and friendly.
If you don’t have time to read through the detailed SiteGround review or want a refresher, here’s a quick summary:
| feature | 4.3★★★★☆ | Premium Business Hosting |
|---|---|---|
| price | ★★★★☆ | SiteGround starts at $2.99. It offers a host of advanced website management tools, strong security, and excellent performance, making it a great value for your money. |
| Easy to use | ★★★★☆ | When it comes to ease of use, SiteGround doesn’t disappoint. Even if you’re a beginner, you’ll get all the support. Creating a website and installing WordPress only takes a few clicks. The same goes for setting up a professional email account. You won’t face any difficulties. |
| Performance | ★★★★★ | As far as performance goes, SiteGround outshines all of our future hosts in this regard. It has a 99.99% uptime, loads my fully built site in less than a second, and can easily handle 50 simultaneous visitors. |
| Safety | ★★★★★ | When it comes to security, SiteGround is no slouch. The provider has implemented several security features designed to protect your website. These include SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and daily backups. |
| support | ★★★☆☆ | Live chat, phone, and help desk tickets are available 24/7. The knowledge base, help widget, and AI chatbot are also useful. The not-so-good part is that you need to spend some time to find the live chat option and toll-free number. |
So who do we recommend SiteGround to?
SiteGround’s shared hosting is best suited for business websites, freelancers, and small agencies. Especially those who need to beat the competition in every department – this provider has all the tools and top performance to help you.
People we don’t recommend using SiteGround for:
If you're building a small personal website, SiteGround might be overkill for you. After all, you wouldn't buy it if you were driving a big truck alone on the crowded New York streets every day, right? It's important to get a service that fits your individual needs. That's why we've picked out a few alternatives that offer different services at different prices.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you click through to visit us, at no extra cost to you. See how SidelinePlay is funded, why it’s important, and how you can support us.
Was this helpful?